Apple's new Mac mini, announced on Tuesday, is simple to open, easy to upgrade, and requires an exceptionally small amount of power — a mere 10 watts at idle.
Such were some of the discoveries made by the intrepid kit-disassemblers, parts-suppliers, and crackerjack troubleshooters at iFixIt in their tear-down of Apple's long- …

Easy access to one drive in the server version

What the macminicolo tear down shows is that you can get at one of the hard drives that is in the server version of the new Mac Mini very easily. As the macminicolo article states, the other drive, the one that is in the non-server version, is buried way down at the bottom.

RAM upgrades

"it's a good thing that easy DIY RAM upgrades are becoming common in Apple products"

Which difficult to upgrade Mac models are you referring to apart from the Mac Mini? The original iMac was a little tricky but not impossible. Adding RAM has always been straight forward on Macs.

The first Mac I added RAM to was a PowerMac 7600 in 1996 which involved pressing two buttons at the back of the case and sliding it off, and the RAM slots were unobstructed. No screws to undo, no hard disks to remove to get access to the RAM slots. G3/G4 PowerMacs had the the cool side door with the rally like D-ring to open to get access to the innards.

"No screws to undo"

This is the problem I have with so many computers lately. It seems to have become unfashionable to use anything so mundane and utilitarian as a screw to hold stuff together. Instead everybody wants to use these damn little plastic clips that are nearly impossible to undo with breaking at least one or two.

Bring back the humble screw, I say! If you don't have an assortment of tools, or at least something like a Leatherman near at hand anyway, what business do you have trying to open up a computer and poke around inside?

Internal power supply

Time Capsules

It was heat that killed the TCs by blowing their capacitors. It was probably made worse by the all-plastic construction and a nice thick layer of rubber on the bottom. After my original one went bang, Apple replaced it with one of the newer designs which runs much cooler - the top surface is barely warm.

The MM will probably also benefit from having an aluminium case that doubles up as a radiator.

Looks like the in-car modding crowd spoke too soon

Not a good idea

"""tear out the power supply, wire your vehicle electrics straight into the motherboard and you're away."""

Yeah, don't do that, you'll just fry the motherboard. A car's power system is extremely noisy, and they're rarely actually 12V. A motherboard expects nice, clean, stable, regulated power from a power supply, connected with short wires, and if it gets anything other than what it's expecting, it's liable to smoke. They make filters for car computer mods, but this computer isn't exactly unique, since they also make mini-itx boards with 12v inputs built in. Chances are OSX in the vehicle would be far more trouble than it's worth.

Too true

A cars voltage normally sits around 14V while the car is running, with spikes under certain conditions and severe drops when cranking.

At the very least you'd need a decent regulator. I'm looking at this myself to convert a Marvel Guruplug into a car PC, and it aint as easy as you'd think (although this runs off 5V). You need to supply a smooth, regulated voltage to any electronic device, and the higher the current and the higher the *range* of draw, the more difficult it becomes.

The mini here draws between approx 0.8A at idle and 7A. 7A is enough to make it either hard work to DIY or pretty expensive to buy.

Just something to be aware of before you start complaining that you blew up your brand new shiney overpriced Mac and blow it up

What's that slid in the front?

What's that slid in the front? It seems to be to wide for an SD-card. And it cannot possibly be a 5 1/2 inch diskette drive. It might be one of those CD-Rom drives which were popular in eht 1990s, but that would seriously be very retro.

Nice little box

I'd like one to wipe and pop Linux on to use it as a home theatre PC. But, and this is common to all Apple kit, not at that price. Halve the cost and I'd buy one or even several, and I bet a lot more people would too.

@Rattus Rattus

Just curious, why Linux? What would make Linux better on this box as a media server? I'm not familiar with media centre software on Linux, but this at least has benefit over the AppleTV (which I own) that you can run Frontrow and watch all your media in iTunes (not just H.264 stuff). Are there Linux packages out there that are superior? Again, I'm just curious.

Agree with you fully about the cost of this thing - if I had oodles of cash, I'd give it a go.

I think...

I think that I'd leave OSX on it, but stick the MythTV client onto it and point it at my Myth backend, it's not the sort of box that I would object to in my living room (we have a strict no-computers in the living room rule) The trouble is that I can't help thinking that it's a bit on the costly side, for any other manufacturer I wouldn't really see it as too expensive, but my experience of Apple's customer services for the G5 that I own is that they are piss-poor at best and that makes it a deal breaker. It's a shame, as I think I'd quite like one otherwise.

Some of the UNIX guys at work got Macs and are now ditching them for PCs with Win/Lin for the same reason.

@AC

MythTV is pretty good, but I wouldn't suggest it for a linux beginner. It can run on frontend (player) and backend (recorder) on Linux (mythbuntu and mythdora are the current most popular) and MacOS. There are standalone frontends available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. You can run frontend on the same machine as the backend.

It's all there at www.mythtv.org, I find the current version pretty good, although older versions have been a bit on the flaky side.

As for Apple's Customer services, it's general stuff like: We lost the system rescue disk, they wanted to charge us the full face value of all the software for the replacement. Many people on the helpdesk are clueless (they didn't know what a PPC chip was one time, another time they told be that a point release was the full upgrade to the next OS version.) When I wanted to upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5, they tried to sell me 10.6 for £25, even though it wouldn't run on my hardware, when I insisted on 10.5 they told me that it would be £85. The fan on the machine got louder and louder and they refused to fix it under warrenty, dispite having the extended warranty thing. It's all pretty low level tedious stuff that I've not had from other PC suppliers that I've dealt with. But, that said, if you've had good experiences and continue to have them, I wish you well...

Hmm...

As much as I dislike Apple...

...I've got to admit, they know how to put hardware together.

I had the (dis?)pleasure of working on a Mac Pro recently, and the guts were like no PC I'd ever seen. No cables in sight, and no fiddly screws. Everything just slotted into place. It was a work of art, I'd even say it was beautiful.

It's a pity they can't put as much thought into the rest of their business!

What worries me

is the use of desktop-and-server class processors in something that is built more like a laptop.

If the heat pipes that carry the heat from the GPU and processor becomes less efficient with time (as I believe they do), I'm sure you will see these cook themselves, as there is no direct cooling of the metal above the processors.

I've seen this happen with laptops using AMD mobile processors. They just break due to getting too hot once they get to a certain age!